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Susan represents a phenomenon so new that most people—including her parents—misunderstand it. She's 18 years old, bright, attractive, and could have won college athletic scholarships. Sometime during her senior year of high school, however, Susan dropped out of sports, took leave from school, and told her parents she wanted to finish via the GED.

That fall, she started at a small local college and then dropped out in the first semester. At the moment, she works in a fast-food restaurant and says she is saving money to move to Peru, a place she knows little about. According to her father, she spends astronomical sums on her cell phone. She has no real plans.

Her parents want their daughter to take advantage of opportunities and work hard in a steady direction. They want to see frugality, discipline, humility, and risk awareness. They're frustrated that nothing they say seems to penetrate.

Susan, however, believes she is doing fine. She assures her dad she will go back to college when she feels ready—if she ever does. She enthuses about her friends, her Pilates class, and skiing. If she doesn't go to Peru, she might head to Colorado and spend the winter playing in the snow. She sees no risk on her horizon. Everything will work out.

Though Susan and her parents share the same house, they sometimes feel as though they inhabit different universes. I am beginning to believe they do.

The easiest way to discuss Susan is to bemoan "today's kids" and their lack of discipline, gumption, and common sense. They are spoiled and overindulged, their elders complain. This is the same song parents have sung for ages, passed from one generation of old fogies to the next. Listening to it, one might easily think Susan represents an eternal constant—young people finding ways to annoy their elders.

That analysis is shortsighted. Susan lives in a new world her parents cannot yet recognize. The newness comes from a simple but striking reality: seemingly unlimited possibility. Middle-class North American children face abundance on every hand. Possibilities and opportunities have expanded so greatly that the very shape of life has changed. They can do anything, go anywhere, be anybody. They see no risk—they can always start over, and they will not starve. The real risk is spiritual. They could lose their souls.

How does one fashion a life out of this profusion of opportunities, especially when there seem to be no penalties for failing? In this wide and undefined field of possibilities, Susan's parents' virtues don't connect. Susan needs a different kind of help than they are offering. She seems to need a different set of virtues.

I have to step lightly here. Many people—some readers, undoubtedly—live under very constrained circumstances and can't identify with the life of abundance I describe. All the same, the reality of unlimited opportunity is increasingly the outlook for middle-class America.

Education. My city's high schools—public high schools—take advertisements in the newspaper appealing for students to attend. Even students expelled from school can choose between multiple specialized schools eager to help them. And then, for those who graduate, their mail arrives full of glossy university appeals that beg them to come. For many students, the agonizing difficulty is to decide which of the manifold offerings they should pursue.

Pleasure. Children grow up in a society devoted to entertaining and distracting them. They can choose from a hundred kinds of fast food. College cafeterias boast award-winning menus. The TV has 200 channels; the cinema multiplex 18 theatres. Even with video games, dance troupes, drama groups, and soccer teams, many still complain they are bored.

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2